Tawa's blog - dedicated to Christian apologetics, the explanation and defence of the Christian faith.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Imaginative Apologetics, Part III - The Need for Imagination in Apologetics

Apologetics, Imagination, and Imaginative Apologetics

A couple years ago, I had
opportunity to write a review article for Trinity
Journal,[1] a
lengthy interaction with Imaginative
Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, edited by
Andrew Davison.[2]
I never took the opportunity to share some of those thoughts here – I now aim
to rectify that!

In my last couple
of blog posts, I surveyed the terrain of historical and contemporary Christian
apologetics. I want you now to consider the place of imagination in Christian thought and apologetics. In subsequent
posts, I will interact with the various articles in Imaginative Apologetics.

In the view of
Andrew Davison, editor of and contributor to Imaginative
Apologetics, apologetics is frequently marked by a paucity of
imagination. Many apologetic works focus so strongly on rational arguments and
proofs that they become “cold or arid.” Thus, the goal of Imaginative Apologetics
is to make apologetics “a matter of wonder and desire,” a presentation of a
Christian truth “that is supremely attractive and engaging.”[3]

Davison is
certainly not alone in his concern that apologetics may be too intellectual,
too arid, and too dry to resonate with contemporary culture. Davison’s concern
with apologetic works that focus “on rational arguments and proofs” reflects a
prominent stream of Christian thought that extends back at least to the Danish
Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, and to some degree represents
disagreement regarding apologetic methodology and practice. In their classic
work, Faith Has Its
Reasons, Kenneth Boa and Robert Bowman identify five apologetic
approaches (or schools of apologetic thought): classical, evidentialist,
reformed, fideist, and integrative.[4] Classical apologetics
focuses upon reasons,
logical arguments that point toward the truth of the faith.[5]
Evidential apologetics focuses upon evidence,
historical and/or scientific data that demonstrates the truth of Christianity.[6]
Reformed apologetics emphasizes revelation,
God’s self-revelation in Scripture that forms the foundation of our faith and thought—the
reformed apologist insists that we cannot reason or think outside of
presupposing the existence of God and the truthfulness of Scripture.[7]
Fideist apologetics highlights the importance of faith,
of casting oneself at the foot of the cross even in the absence of evidence.[8]
Boa and Bowman’s preferred “integrative” approach utilizes insights from all
four schools of thought.[9]

Classical and
evidential apologetics are both susceptible to accusations of arid rationality
and neglecting the human, existential, or imaginative element of interpersonal
dialogue. It seems, indeed, that Davison and the other contributors to Imaginative Apologetics
have these two apologetic approaches in mind. John Milbank’s stirring Foreword
reads in part:

Today also we have . . . an assumption that the only “reason”
which discloses truth is a cold, detached reason that is isolated from both
feeling and imagination, as likewise from both narrative and ethical
evaluation. Christian apologetics now needs rather to embrace the opposite
assumption that our most visionary and ideal insights can most disclose the
real, provided that this is accompanied by a widening in democratic scope of
our sympathies for the ordinary, and the capacities and vast implications of
the quotidian.[10]

In Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, Kierkegaard noted that contemporary apologists might
successfully prove the authenticity and historicity of the Bible along with
other significant theological truths. Rational demonstration of the
truthfulness of the faith, however, would be empty. Kierkegaard asks: “Has
anyone who previously did not have faith been brought a single step nearer to
its acquisition? No, not a single step.”[11]
Elsewhere, Kierkegaard complains that attempts to make Christian faith
plausible to society at large can only succeed (or “triumph”) insofar as they
“have lost everything and entirely quashed Christianity.”[12]
Kierkegaard believed that Christian faith could only be embraced
(fideistically) by a leap into the dark, trusting in the supra-rational truths
of the Christian faith. A faith that was reasonable was, for Kierkegaard, not a
faith worth holding at all.

One need not
embrace Kierkegaard’s suspicion of reasonable faith in order to be wary of
classical or evidential apologetics. Twentieth-century thinkers from Barth to
Van Til to Plantinga have questioned the necessity and/or helpfulness of
rational or evidential supports for Christian belief. And, despite the
renaissance of presuppositional (or Reformed) apologetics in the latter half of
the twentieth century,[13]
it remains the case that the history of Christian apologetics in the modern
(and postmodern) period is predominantly classical (rational) and/or evidential
in tone and form. William Paley’s evidentialism and Joseph Butler’s classical approach[14]
are reflected in twentieth-century descendants like William Lane Craig, Gary
Habermas, John Warwick Montgomery, and Richard Swinburne.[15]

Despite the
obvious appeal and popularity (and, I would add, effectiveness) of classical
and evidential apologetics, many worry that those approaches overly emphasize
rationality and evidences. As such, those schools of thought may unduly
capitulate to a modernism that glorifies exalted and autonomous human reason. Worse
yet, classical and evidentialist apologetics may have surrendered to a
Cliffordian evidentialist challenge: if you cannot prove a belief by reasons
and evidence, then you are immoral in holding the belief at all.[16]
Intellectualist apologetics, it is argued, is insufficient to resonate with the
whole person; we need to recapture the sense of imagination in apologetic
appeals.

Davison and his
contributors find some similarly-concerned company in the contemporary scene of
Christian philosophy and apologetics. And it is to that company that we will
turn in my next blog post. Stay tuned!

[4]
Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, Jr., Faith
Has Its Reasons: Integrative Approaches to Defending the Christian Faith,
Second Edition (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2005). Other scholars identify
apologetic approaches somewhat differently. See, e.g., Five Views on Apologetics, edited by
Steven B. Cowan (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000). Cowan omits Fideism as an
apologetic approach, separates out Presuppositionalism from Reformed
Epistemology, and adds a Cumulative Case approach. In a more recent work, James
Beilby identifies three apologetic strategies,
insisting that more specific approaches or schools fit within one or the other
of these strategies—evidentialist, presuppositionalist, and experientialist.
James K. Beilby, Thinking
About Christian Apologetics: What It Is and Why We Do It (Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 95-102.